ICO Partners

Interesting article from FIFA 09’s producer on Edge Online.  What he says are very classical elements of online game design, development and publishing, but it’s still very interesting to hear about them from such an established and mainstream offline franchise perspective.

Maybe it’s just the interview being published long after it was made, but the game was released early October, so insisting on the first weeks results might mean that the game is not that sticky?

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According to the Financial Times quoting IDC, most of the growth on the laptop market comes from netbooks (small, lightweight PCs on Windows or Linux, destined first and foremost to browse the web - the most famous one is the adorable little Asus Eee PC, of which I am a proud owner). IDC expects them to represent as much as 11-12% of the laptop market in 2009.

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Various bits from different sources - some of them are a bit old, but then we just opened the blog :

• November Steam Hardware Survey (which is skewed towards “gamers” system in comparison to general PC user base)- shows DX10 system (DX10 capable GPU + Vista) accounts for 21% of Steam user base - in progress, but DX8, 9 and older GPU systems are still the majority (54%). On the other hand, multi-core is now majoritary (60%, with 10% quad-core).
• Speaking of Steam, the new beta version is integrating an in-game web browser. It’s good to see that multi-tasking is now embraced more and more. It looks better than Rogue, but less adavanced than PlayXpert (but they have all the other Steam features they can integrate with).

• Is the VC model broken? (It’s been published a while ago, but still interesting to watch. Can it mean an opportunity for the few cash-rich publishers to play a bigger role in funding?). Also, don’t miss Jussi’s and Adam’s article about online-game related VC investment defying dowturn in October.
• Street Fighter HD designer reveals console patch frustration. He states that it’s ok because SF is an old game and very little testing was required, but otherwise he would have been forced to test it on PC…

First of all, welcome on ICO Partners’ blog.
When putting together the website with Diane, we were arguing back and forth on the merit to actually have a blog there. The initial position we agreed on was not to have one. There were many reasons, but mainly, we decided against it because we knew that we would be very busy and the blog was always going to be left as a “when we have time” thing, and that always translate into in a “if we have time” thing.

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